Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Vincent Basciano will be sentenced officially on July 20th at 2:00 pm in Brooklyn federal court. The result will be a foregone conclusion: life in a federal penitentiary. He already has one life sentence so this will be nothing new. Basciano was spared the death penalty last week by a unanimous jury decision. By a 12-0 vote the jurors said life was the appropriate sentence. 10 jurors also wrote in a special mitigating circumstanec: "There are other members of organized crime that have admitted to an equal or greater number of serious crimes that are not facing the death penalty, much less incarceration." This was a sound rejection of the government pursuit of capital punishment, which even Judge Nicholas Garaufis had asked to not be considered in a letter to the government so time ago. Other mitigating circumstances supported by all jurors was the fact that the federal prisons could control Basciano, that Dominick Cicale, Michael Mancuso and Anthony Aiello were equally culpable for the death of Randy Pizzolo and don't face death, that Pizzolo voluntarily engaged in violent conduct and in a sense contributed to his own death.